How hubris and complacency put boxers’ hopes out for count in Rio
As expectation soared for our Olympic boxing team, ominous signs were apparent but were ignored, writes Eamonn Sweeney
THE Irish boxing squad’s 2016 Olympic campaign has been one of the greatest debacles in Irish sporting history. It’s tempting to compare it to the Saipan affair but that analogy doesn’t really work. For one thing, the Irish soccer team actually did quite well at the 2002 World Cup finals.
A more appropriate comparison might be with the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. Like the Irish economy in the Tiger era, Irish amateur boxing seemed an unassailable example of how to do things the right way — a source of pride for ourselves and envy for our neighbours. Then, suddenly, the entire edifice collapsed and with it the reputation which had been so painstakingly built up over the previous decade.
The saddest thing is that, as was also the case during the economic collapse, our wounds were largely self-inflicted. Our problems were rooted in hubris. High achievement led to an arrogant belief that no matter what we did, things would turn out all right. Instead, poor decision-making and complacency sowed the seeds of disaster. It didn’t have to turn out this way.
Four years ago at the London Olympics, the amateur boxing programme was the jewel in the crown of the Irish sporting world. The four medals won by the boxers contributed hugely to the haul of six which made 2012 the most successful Irish Olympic campaign of all time. Only three countries, Britain, Russia and the Ukraine, won more boxing medals than Ireland.
John Joe Nevin may have turned professional after the games but with Katie Taylor, Michael Conlan and Paddy Barnes opting to stay in the amateur ranks great things were expected again in Rio de Janeiro. The world championships held in Qatar last October seemed to indicate that things were going according to plan. Conlan became our first ever world champion and Ireland finished fourth on the medals table even without Barnes, who’d already qualified for the Olympics through the World Series of Boxing, and Taylor, as the women’s world championships wouldn’t take place until the following year.
Yet a dark cloud hung over Ireland at the championships — one which, when it burst, would begin the process that ended with the washing away of Irish boxing’s Olympic hopes. A couple of weeks before the Qatar tournament had come the news that Billy Walsh, the legendary head coach of boxing’s High Performance Programme (HPP), was departing to become the head coach of the US women’s team.
From the outside the news seemed like a bombshell but it was merely the culmination of a troubled relationship between Walsh and the sport’s governing body, the Irish Amateur Boxing Association (IABA), one which went back as far as the aftermath of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. When director of the High Performance Unit (HPU) Gary Keegan left following the games, Walsh took the job on an acting basis. It took the IABA almost two years to advertise for a replacement for Keegan and instead of Walsh, the obvious choice, they awarded the job to association president Dominic O’Rourke.
The Sports Council, who was to fund the position, refused to accept this and eventually a compromise was reached which involved Walsh being made head coach at the HPU.
However, the continued refusal of the IABA to make him High Performance director meant that he was paid less than those doing the same job in other sports. Right after the London Olympics he observed: “We’re not valued for what we do. We’re making history, bringing more medals into this country than any other sport. I know for a fact that I’m the lowest paid High Performance manager, or whatever you want to call it, of all sports.”
After those games, the debrief carried out by London consultancy firm Knight, Kavanagh & Page criticised the IABA, who it said: “See fit to overturn performance director selections, to ask specific athletes to enter ‘box-offs’ against the advice of HP staff, and have imposed members of staff on the HPP without performance director assent.”
The debrief should have been taken as a warning by the IABA. Instead the relationship continued to worsen. Walsh was being head-hunted by several foreign boxing programmes yet there’s no doubt that he would have preferred to stay in Ireland. Even after the Americans offered him a huge increase in salary along with health insurance and pension coverage, neither of which he had in his job in Ireland, he tried to negotiate a deal with the IABA. The Irish Sports Council brokered a deal which then fell to bits when, at the last minute, the IABA asked for substantial changes to what had already been agreed. It was a humiliating experience for Walsh.
Yet he accompanied the Irish team to Qatar and was in their corner there. On his return, then Minister for Sport Michael Ring made one final attempt to put together a deal which would keep Walsh in the country. That also fell through.
There was a sense of a man finally brought to the end of his tether by a never-ending series of slights, such as the decision near the end of his reign to switch his secretary from the HPU to the IABA. Manager of the Irish team at the world championships Joe Hennigan wondered aloud: “His secretary was doing fantastic work and then they moved her from A to B. Why did they move her when there was no need to move her?” Hennigan also pointed out that, “No matter who comes in, and no matter how good they are, you cannot put 10 months’ work into the 13 years’ work put in by Billy.”
It’s important to remember what happened to Billy Walsh because this is not one of those cases where the media are being wise after the event. In the immediate aftermath of the Wexford man’s departure, there were plenty of predictions that the boxing team’s displays at the Olympics would be adversely affected by his absence. So it has come to pass.
At the time, defenders of the IABA tended to come up with the line that Walsh’s deputy, the Georgian Zaur Antia, was actually the more gifted technical coach of the two and that Walsh’s contribution was largely organisational and motivational. That may be true. In which case, we’ve just seen what an enormous part organisation and motivation can play in sporting success.
The departure of Walsh seemed unthinkable. But something else unthinkable happened as we entered 2016. Katie Taylor started to lose. Her defeat in April at the Olympic qualifiers in Turkey by Yana Alekseevna of Azerbaijan was a seismic shock — but one which could be dismissed as freakish. But when she was defeated in the quarter-finals of the world championships in May by France’s Estelle Mossely it was clear that something was seriously amiss with a boxer who’d been utterly dominant in her division for a decade.
Taylor’s problems also seemed to stem from a coaching change. In this case, it was the absence of her father Pete from the corner. Pete Taylor had coached his daughter all through the glory years but in the past year that relationship has come to an end. Her sense of entering uncharted waters can only have been exacerbated by the departure of Walsh.
Something else unprecedented happened at those Olympic qualifiers in Turkey. Two Irish boxers, Michael O’Reilly and Dean Walsh, were sent home for breaches of team discipline. The IABA had always been proud of the standards of behaviour exhibited by members of the international team and this would have been a significant disappointment to them. O’Reilly and Walsh were ordered to participate in box-offs to re-earn their places at the final Olympic qualifiers but these were cancelled at the last minute. Once more the impression was of disarray and confusion.
O’Reilly secured a spot at the games at the final qualifiers and was regarded as a medal contender. Yet according to John Conlan, one of the Irish coaches and the father of world champion Michael, O’Reilly was regularly missing training camps.
Meanwhile, Paddy Barnes, Ireland’s biggest medal hope, hadn’t fought in 16 months and was struggling to make the weight at light flyweight. According to his own account, Barnes had failed to make the weight on several occasions while qualifying for the World Series of Boxing, resulting in his team being fined. Yet, though he had ample time to do so, no-one suggested that Barnes try to qualify at flyweight which he would have done with ease.
As the Irish team left for Rio, things looked rosy from the outside. The departure of Walsh looked as though it could be overcome, the bookies odds had Barnes and Taylor down for gold, light heavyweight Joe Ward for silver and Michael Conlan for bronze. Rio, it seemed, would be like London only better.
Instead, one disaster has followed another. On the eve of the competition, it was revealed that Michael O’Reilly had tested positive for a prohibited substance. The IABA can be forgiven for being wrong-footed but it beggars belief that two weeks later there has still been no statement from O’Reilly’s club coach Pat Ryan, who also happens to be the association’s president.
Barnes exited the competition in his first fight against unknown Spanish rookie Samuel Carmona, his weight problems obvious in an exhausted performance. Joe Ward also lost his first fight, the excuse that his Ecuadorian opponent Carlos Mina’s negative approach made him impossible to fight ringing hollow when a French boxer knocked Mina out in the next round. Saddest of all to witness was the first-round defeat of Taylor, outpointed by a 35-year-old Finnish opponent she had defeated with ease on previous occasions. The sight of as invincible a champion as Irish sport has ever seen apparently overcome by unhappiness and confusion was perhaps the most telling image of a catastrophic fortnight.
The most telling statistic was that Taylor was one of four Irish boxers who lost their very first fight. You had to go back to 2004 for the last time an Irish fighter had been beaten first time out at the Olympics and now, suddenly, they were falling like ninepins. There was something telling too about the public spat between John Conlan and the IABA over the question of how much training Michael O’Reilly had missed. Even at the height of the Billy Walsh controversy, there had been little public disagreement on the IABA side. They’d run a tight ship then, now the association seemed riven by dissent.
There would be no medals for Irish boxing in Rio — something no-one had foreseen. The bookies had predicted three or four Olympic medals for Ireland, and it was the boxers who were expected to deliver them. The IABA had been so proud of previous efforts that it never tired of describing amateur boxing as “Ireland’s most successful amateur sport”. This time, however, the sport added nothing to the national Olympic effort but feelings of frustration and disappointment.
Irish boxing has suffered fallow periods before. Between the 1992 Olympics — when Michael Carruth won gold and Wayne McCullough silver — and the 2008 games — when medals for Kenneth Egan, Darren Sutherland and Paddy Barnes announced a renaissance — lay a long stretch of underachievement. In both 2000 and 2004, only one Irish boxer qualified for the games. Those boxers won just one fight between them.
But the sense of disappointment is much greater now because expectations are so high. Irish amateur boxing’s achievements at the Olympics have seen its top fighters rewarded with copious State funding. When this year’s awards under the Irish Sports Council’s High Performance Scheme were announced in June, boxing received more money than any other sport. Its €368,000 dwarfed the €220,000 made available to athletics, the €132,000 given to sailing, the €118,00 received by rowing. The money for boxing was more than the combined total for our Paralympians, some of whom have won gold at the Paralympics.
That level of funding carries a burden of responsibility and it’s likely that the inquest into Irish boxing’s Olympic disaster will be thorough, painful, public and rancorous.
In the wake of Michael Conlan’s controversial defeat by Russia’s Vladimir Nikitin there were half-hearted attempts to pretend that Ireland’s demise could be blamed on dubious judging and corruption within the sport. However, this theory is undercut by the fact that the other nations who normally do well at major championships are doing well again at Rio. Only Ireland has failed.
This is Irish boxing’s crash of 2008 moment. How long its recession lasts may well depend on what action is taken next.
‘There was a sense of a man finally brought to the end of his tether by a series of slights’